SOURCE - http://www.normangirvan.com
This is what Walter said:
“The villages were self-governing units….They were not merely units of
production… Primarily, their function was to guarantee that life could be
reproduced within that physical space called a village, and that the Africans themselves had the power to decide how that space was to be policed, and how the rates and taxes that were produced were going to be spent to maintain sanitation and so on within the village.
They exercised this political power for about 25 years after freedom in 1838.
Then in the mid-1860s, the colonial power awoke to the realization that a whole alternative political centre now existed, that local government was in the hands of a different class – the rural proletariat combined with a few peasants. This was untenable because they were coming into conflict with the central government which was still controlled by the planters. At this point in the 1860s, the central government moved to curtail the exercise of local government. But for some 25 years, the working class had organized itself as a political class because it was exercising political power at the local government level.” Published as “From
******yard to Village” by WPA, May 1, 1988